One of the more exciting & unexpected developments in my now four decades plus of opera-going is the resurgence, not just in specialty festivals but in mainstream houses, of that expansive & rich body of work, once considered as extinct as the brontosaurus: baroque opera. Not surprisingly revival has come at an uneven rate, & while some works are well known, there are others, even by a giant like Handel, that are relatively obscure; such a one is Tolomeo, which Philharmonia Baroque revived this week. I saw the first performance, in Herbst Theater. Musically the piece was rich enough to satisfy any opera lover, especially with such a truly outstanding cast, but dramatically the semi-staged production by James Darrah Black was less satisfying.
PBO's new Music Director, Peter Whelan, led a lively & musically convincing performance, with a stellar cast of singers: countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen in the title role, soprano Lauren Snouffer as his beloved wife Seleuce, countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as his younger brother Alessandro, bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Araspe, king of Cyprus, & soprano Nicole Heaston as Elisa, his sister. The first three, members of the Egyptian royal family, are in exile or hiding or shipwrecked on Cyprus, & therefore to some extent under the power of Araspe & his sister. Complications romantic, dynastic, & familial inevitably ensue. There's no point in spelling them out; baroque operas have notoriously convoluted plots, but the action is generally clear enough in performance, & I will continue to insist that the shifting & often disguised layers of love, longing, & loss portrayed are psychologically & dramatically truer to life than the grand passions of verismo. As is usual in baroque opera, the characters were called on to display a wide variety of emotions (though Araspe was mostly restricted to the anger produced by rebuffed royal love, which Burton delivered with magisterial fury) & the cast was on-point, each time & in all moods; vocally, it was a glorious evening of glowing splendors.
Dramatically things were less certain. Here's one of the points at which vocalization & characterization intersect: Elisa's love for the disguised Tolomeo was portrayed in a comically overdone, almost camp, way. This is a legitimate choice, & Heaston played it extremely well, but it's not the choice I would have preferred. Once you've established Elisa as a comic character, with basically silly emotions rooted in the whims of an entitled princess, then halfway through the opera when her love turns to vengeful anger, it's difficult at that point to start taking those emotions seriously – and if her threats don't carry a sense of real danger with them, then the dramatic tension is really defused.
Also, there's a tendency to see baroque opera as lots of lovely tunes wrapped around a hollow core, emptied of significance, which I think diminishes what these works can actually accomplish for present-day listeners who are open to them. The conventions are already to start with alien enough for many modern audiences; turning them into campy comedy scenes is, I think, something that should be done very sparingly.
I said above that the basic action of baroque opera, however convoluted in the plot synopsis, is clear in performance, but I need to modify that a bit, as on Thursday night the basic story-telling was often unclear, though I'm familiar enough with what is likely to be going on to make educated guesses. At one point, if the characters themselves weren't narrating what they were seeing & doing ("Why is my beloved, who ungratefully doesn't love me, going over to that shepherd? Why is she speaking to him, a mere lowly shepherd? I will slay him!"), we would have been completely lost. During one aria Tolomeo was in front of Seleuce, who was singing about him, but apparently he was meant to be only in her thoughts (the usually lively & sensitive Cohen was stiff & withdrawn at those moments, which is why I think we were meant to "read" him as present only in her mind).
The ending was very confusing: Elisa has given Tolomeo a poison. I guessed that it would be some sort of narcotic sleeping potion, as it's unlike baroque opera to kill off the hero like that: the eighteenth century liked its happy endings; or, to put it in a more appropriately philosophical way, they liked to have order restored to & on the restless world before sending the audience out into the seething night. I was right about the sleeping potion. But Elisa has also announced that she's seen Seleuce slaughtered in front of her – but then the very much alive Seleuce is led in. Elisa doesn't even look surprised. What's going on? Afterwards I read the plot synopsis & it turns out that Alessandro, who has decided to do the right thing & restore his elder brother to the throne of Egypt, has rescued her. I think the libretto itself was a bit slapdash there, but the staging didn't help things.
The costumes didn't help either. Everyone was in vaguely contemporary outfits, mostly in those sort of wheat-ash-pale pale olive green-beige-taupe shades. At first I thought they all looked like models in a Banana Republic catalogue. Then I noticed there were some differences: the brothers Tolomeo & Alessandro both wore stylish hiking boots (which I envied), while Araspe had very polished black dress shoes. His shirt was black, though his linen suit was pale ash-grey or off-white or some other evanescent shade, & his sister also wore black, though her outfit was also topped with a pale jacket. Seleuce wore a lovely pale (yellowish?) sundress & then partway through switched to a different lovely pale (greenish?) sundress; I don't know why she changed. Were Alessandro's earrings & painted nails part of the characterization, or just the personal style of the singer? (Or both?) And I don't know how some of these distinctions (like the footwear) would be seen if you weren't sitting in the front row, as I was, so I don't know quite what was going on there. I don't really need characters dressed like "shepherds" or "kings" but it's helpful to paint some of these differences in broader strokes & brighter colors, & it might be helpful if characters in disguise have some sort of rudimentary, even symbolic, disguise; otherwise you may well wonder why someone is looking directly at the beloved spouse he or she has been pining for in aria after aria yet does not recognize said beloved. There's suspending belief, & then there's asking for the impossible.
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On either side of the stage there were what looked like parts of a wrecked plane, built out of wood, half-buried in sand. These weren't really used, & were meant to indicate that Tolomeo had crash-landed on Cyprus, or at least I think that's what they meant. Stretched along the front of the stage were fluorescent tubes on wooden blocks, which were moved into different shapes on occasion (& the bulbs changed colors sometimes). In the middle of the stage, behind the row of lights, there were some wooden boxes covered with some sort of foam insulation & tied down with ropes. These were eventually removed, & used to tie up a character, & inside the wooden boxes there were large mirrored cubes, which came out in the last half & were stared at by various characters for long periods.
This was an interesting idea, & multivalent enough to be intriguing: was the staring literally a reflection of their narcissism? In the director's note, which I read afterwards, there is a suggestion that even the reflection of a face can't convey everything that face signifies or that that person has gone through. There was a comic edge sometimes: the first person to stare into the mirrored cube was Elisa, & the action seemed in line with her self-indulgent vanity (I couldn't help thinking of Semele in her Handel opera, staring into a mirror & singing Myself I shall adore, if I persist in gazing). Afterwards an audience member who seemed delighted with the mirrored cubes referred to them as the characters' cellphones (because everyone kept staring into them obliviously), & you could follow that line of thought too, satirically &/or seriously.
There were some striking stage pictures, so much so that the man next to me took several surreptitious photos (he was actually not nearly as annoying as the couple behind me who frequently whispered & then emitted a round of high-pitched giggles). The staging was at its best when it worked on a symbolic, poetic, signifying level, which is where the striking stage pictures would come in; where it fell down was with the basic what is going on here stuff. I do know people who just don't even bother trying to follow the plot twists & emotional complexities, but just bask in the music, &, you know, sure, there are many mansions &c, but for these wonderful works to maintain their newfound theatrical vitality, at some level they need to make sense & be taken seriously. It sounds prosaic, even banal, even, oh horror, literalist & low-brow, to insist that the action should be clear, but it's especially important in a work as little-known as this one. If you mess around with Tosca, some people will have a fit (I am definitely not one of them), but a large part of the audience will know what you're playing around with. That's not the case with Tolomeo.
Having said all that, I have to go back to swimming in the musical glories of the evening. Even if I didn't love Handel & baroque opera as much as I do, just the chance to hear the vivid orchestral playing & the endlessly glorious unfurling singing would have been enough. I wonder if anyone made a surreptitious recording to go with my neighbor's photos?
